At the moment, these Moomin figurines are our favorites. They sing, dance, cook and play hide-and-seek all day long. We also used to have Little My, but she was the smallest of the bunch and the best one at hiding, so it’s been some weeks since the last time we saw her.

These are from a Moomin advent calendar we bought this Christmas.

I think every figurine is hand-painted, and all of them as surprisingly well-made.

Making jewelry is something we do daily, too. It’s fun and it’s great for fine motor skills (super important for a bilingual child!).

Hey guys! I hope your winter holidays have been great! Our Christmas tree is still up, spreading its needles all over the place. And, to everyone’s pleasure, Santa keeps leaving small presents for Johannes under it to this day.

I just finished reading Robert Galbraith’s recently published second novel called “The Silkworm”, which is the sequel to “The Cuckoo’s Calling”.
J.K. Rowling, who writes under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith is a great storyteller, and while I thought “The Silkworm” was good, I kind of expected more of book written by her (I guess, starting with a clean slate with no expectations from the readers is one of the main reasons writers chose to work under pseudonyms!). Somehow I didn’t feel much compassion for the main characters and, without giving away too much, I found the ending quite predictable. Although, that might just be me having read too many detective stories over the years.

And on a different note, I just saw that Pantone pronounced marsala the color of the year 2015. Finally a nice and flattering color of the year! I guess now we’ll be seeing a lot of this brownish wine shade in fashion both high and low. Everything from bordeaux and burgundy to oxblood will be widely available, and I’m so jumping that train!

We live very close to a forest. You could even say we live in a forest. Not a park or anything, but a real Swedish forest with deer, foxes, owls and creatures.
And whenever I open my kitchen window, there’s a risk a bird from the woods flies in! Like it did this morning.

At least, this is a small one. Last week there was a woodpecker trying to get in!

Some people I know consider it poor taste to start Christmas decorating before December, but I don’t agree. I pretty much start preparing for Christmas as soon as Halloween is over. There are two main reasons; one practical and one emotional.

In October the sun shines only about 9 hours a day here in Gothenburg, so most of the time it’s completely dark. And we only see less and less light until mid-December. I find that Christmas decorations do the best job of compensating for the increasing darkness.

The other reason is simply that I enjoy Christmas so much, I want to extend it as much as possible. To save all the celebrating for just one or a few days just seems like such a waste of joy.

However, I’m far from done with my preparations. In fact, I haven’t even decided whether to go for a real Christmas tree or a plastic one. Although, I am leaning towards a nice plastic tree. It just seems so much more practical, considering all the running around that goes on in my house these days.

I get so many nice emails from you guys! Every now and then someone decides to drop me a line saying something kind. Even when I was absent from here, people stumbled upon my blog and told me how much they liked it – daily!

However, I get so many odd letters, too. People read this article on dating in Sweden (which is the most popular article on this site, it gets thousands of hits every week). Then they notice the name of the website. To them, the words Swedish Love Affair must be suggesting it’s a dating site.

Not only do some strangers wish to “get to know” me better. Some are also asking me about “hooking up with a Swedish woman”. Or a Swedish man. “How to marry a Swedish woman?” is a common question, “how to marry a Swedish man?” is another. Yeah, if I knew the answer I would have done it already, wouldn’t I? Haha!

Some people send me short versions of their biographies and attach photos to make it easier for me too hook them up with someone. They all tell me they’re nice and kind people. Maybe I should start an agency? Swedish Love Affair – dive into a love affair! That would be my slogan.

No, seriously. I’m considering filtering my email so it would sort out certain keywords. ‘Marry’ would be one of them for me.

Now this is what I call a proper break from the blog! Hello again, dear readers!
I have missed you.

A lot of things have happened since we spoke last. The biggest one is that we have moved to a different city. Hannes got a new job, which gave us a choice of a few large cities to move to (Stockholm and Copenhagen among them), so exciting! We almost moved to Stockholm, but however, at the last minute we decided for Gothenburg.
Gothenburg is the second largest city in Sweden, and is also the place where both Hannes and I grew up. Who would have thought! This means our families and most of our friends are always near, so we can hang out and Johannes gets to know them well.
We have only lived here a month or so, and so far I’m happy. I will tell you more in detail about our new place and other points-of-interest soon!

Hello! Many of you remembered my birthday last week – thank you all for your kind birthday messages and wishes! The day (it was a Friday) was partly spent at my favorite cafe eating cake. There were a lot of hyacinths and presents.
And then I went out for a day in the sun testing my new Speedlight flash, which was one of the best birthday presents I could ever imagine!